John R. Rice
Rev. John Richard Rice was a Texas Baptist evangelist, founder of The Sword of the Lord, and a major fundamentalist influence whose anti-Catholic, patriarchal, anti-modernist, and white-supremacist religious framework helped shape the later Religious Right and overlapped strongly with doctrines promoted by William Branham. Raised in a Ku Klux Klan-connected family and rooted in the same Texas fundamentalist world that produced figures such as Roy E. Davis, Rice advanced teachings against women preachers, women in authority, and women cutting their hair, especially through Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers, themes that later became central to Branham's sermons and cultic identity markers. Rice's role in post-Scopes fundamentalism, his connections to nationally recognized ministers, and his claims about Fascism and Mussolini show how many ideas Branham later presented as prophetic revelation were already circulating in radical fundamentalist networks before Branham's rise in the healing revivals.
Rev. John Richard Rice (1895-1980) was a Baptist evangelist and pastor from Texas. He founded "The Sword of the Lord", a religious newspaper based upon fundamentalist and white suprematistic views. Rice was born in Cooke County, TX, just north of Fort Worth, TX where Roy E. Davis began his evangelistic career. Rice was the son of Will Rice, a preacher, one-term state legislator, Freemason in the Masonic order of Odd Fellows, and an outspoken member of the Ku Klux Klan.[1] Rice mentored thousands of recognized ministers, including Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell.[2] Rice's Fundamentalist doctrines eventually gave birth to the Religious Right.[3]
Many of the “divine truths” that William Branham claimed to bring from God to a "lost and dying world" came to Rice long before William Branham's rise to fame in the Post WWII Healing Revivals. Aligned with the Ku Klux Klan, rice was very outspoken against the Catholic Church. As a hard-core fundamentalist, Rice was strongly against women in leadership roles in the church and taught that women should be subservient to men. He was also strongly against women cutting their hair, which he called "bobbing their hair". In 1941, Rice published a book explaining these positions, called "Bobbed Hair, Bossy Wives, and Women Preachers". These doctrines from Rice would become common themes in William Branham's ministry and foundational doctrines for Branham's cult of personality. Branham frequently used the phrase "bobbed hair" during his sermons.[4]
In 1925, the Fundamentalist movement was driven underground after The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes.[5] Roy E. Davis served two years as a national director of the Fundamentalists of the world along with John Roach Straton,[6] and began building his Pentecostal Baptist Church of God sect as part of the underground network. William Branham was a leader in the Pentecostal Baptist Church of God.[7]
Interestingly, Rice also claimed to have had predictions concerning the Fascism of Italy, which William Branham also began claiming in the 1950s. In March of 1953, Branham began claiming to have prophesied in 1933 that Fascist leader Benito Mussolini would cause the end of world peace.[8]